Ira Magaziner

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Ira Magaziner (born November 8, 1947?^[1]) was an aide to President Clinton and later became his chief Internet policy advisor. He is perhaps best known for starting what later became ICANN. Magaziner is also known for leading, along with Hillary Clinton, the failed Task Force to Reform Health Care in the early Clinton administration. Despite calls from some that he step down after the Health Care Program died in Congress, Clinton asked Magaziner to stay to become his "Internet Czar". As the Internet was still in its developing stages, Magaziner played a great role in maintaining the Internet as a duty free zone.

During his college years at Brown University, Magaziner was one of the two architects of the "New Curriculum", a liberal academic approach which includes no core requirements aside from the concentration the student pursues. Magaziner excelled academically at Brown; he was named valedictorian of his class in 1969. He was named a Rhodes Scholar upon graduation. At Oxford, Magaziner met Bill Clinton, also a Rhodes Scholar, who would become a close friend and boss during the 1990s.

Magaziner worked as a corporate stategist for the Boston Consulting Group in Boston, London and Tokyo from 1973 to 1979. He founded Telesis in 1979 and built it into a respected international firm with offices in the U.S., France, Japan and Australia. Magaziner sold Telesis in 1986 to Towers Perrin Inc. and managed the U.S. strategy practice for Towers Perrin from 1986 to 1989.

In the 1970s, Magaziner was the BCG consultant in charge of creating a national industrial strategy for the country of Sweden. This lead to the infamous "Boston Report," which was generally vilified by Swedish politicians. Two decades later the future Magaziner's team envisioned in terms of rising and declining industries had come to pass almost fully.^{[citation needed]}

In 1990, Magaziner was the architect of Richard Miller's failed attempt to turn Wang Laboratories around.^[2]

Magaziner also had significant influence in Rhode Island, where he devised a plan, known as the Greenhouse Compact, which, upon approval by the voters, he believed would resolve several key economic issues in the state and create several business "incubators". Opposed by politicians and business leaders, it was overwhelmingly rejected by voters in 1984.

He is currently CEO of SJS Advisors, a consulting company. Simultaneously, Magaziner is Chairman of the AIDS Initiative and Chairman of the Clinton Foundation Policy Board at the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation.

Magaziner lives in Milton, Massachusetts and in Bristol, Rhode Island with his wife Suzanne and children Seth, Jonathan and Sarah.

[edit] References

1. ^ Ira Magaziner. Soylent Communications. Retrieved on 2006-10-12.
2. ^ Warsh, David (1993), "Only You, Dick Daring," The Boston Globe, March 21, 1993, Business p. 77: "His last major consulting engagement, at Wang Laboratories, bombed... Magaziner proposed to take Wang out of the manufacture of computers altogether, and to go big into imaging software instead. It was the right idea, says one corporate director, but he had no idea how to implement it. The company is preparing to leave the protection of the bankruptcy act -- without Miller."